James River Priority Series 3/25

Mike and I were boat 51 for this derby (for the whole season actually) and we made the long run to the Chick. Mike had found a spot on Thursday that had a couple good fish on it and we decided that would be where we would start our day. When we get to our starting spot the water was dead low and just starting to come in. We fished the area pretty good with no bites so we decided to run to the spot I caught the 8 lber 3 weeks ago. Again no bites. Cruised a little further down to a flat with a ditch and finally Mike gets our first bite. Nice 4 lber to get started. Shortly after I caught a 2 lber. We stuck with this spot for another 30-45 minutes and picked up 2 more small keepers. By now the wind is picking up pretty good. I decided to go back to our starting spot with the water up a little bit now. Messed around and finally I get a good bite. Somehow my brother got the net hung on one of the guides in my rod while I'm fighting the fish and I'm thinking we're gonna lose this one. He gets it undone and we land the fish and it's about 4.5 lbs. That's our limit. Time to cull some runts. We move a little further up and I catch another decent fish that culls. Those were the only 2 bites we could manage there so we went back to where we caught the first 4. I managed to catch a 3 lber here that culls another small one. We have a decent bag at this point but we felt we still needed another 3-4 lber to make a check. We went to the 2 spots we caught them good 3 weeks ago and the wind was so bad on both spots that it wasn't gonna happen. We ran back to the James and fished the mouth of a creek and caught a couple fish that didn't help. Was a bumpy boat ride back for sure. My back still hurts! lol We felt like we had around 14+ lbs and to our surprise they weighed 15.32 when we put them on the scales. That was good enough for a 13th place finish and a check.
The fishing overall was tough. We didn't get near the bites we thought we would get. We caught a total of 12 bass with 2 spots producing the majority of our fish. Still can't give away much because we do this again in 2 weeks but the majority of our fish came on a bait that I made. I'll leave it at that. Haha Water temp was 52-55 and most of the fish we caught were shallow. All on imcoming tide.